Across China on Foot eBook

[Footnote AF: The marriage laws were instituted
by the China Inland Mission at Sa-pu-shan, where a
great work is being done among the Hua Miao.
A good many more stipulations are embodied in the excellent
rules, but I have no room here to detail.—­E.J.D.]

[Footnote AG: The Chinese have the crudest ideas
of the age of foreigners. Among themselves the
general custom is for a man to shave his upper lip
so long as his father is alive, so that in the ordinary
course a man wearing a moustache is looked upon as
an old man. In Tong-ch’uan-fu the rumor
got abroad that three “uei kueh ren” ("foreign
men”) went riding horses—­(two young
ones and one old one. The “old one”
was myself, because I had hair on my top lip, despite
the fact that I was considerably the junior.
And the fact that one was a lady was not deemed worthy
of the slightest consideration.—­E.J.D.]

CHAPTER XVI.

Lu-feng-hsien and its bridge. Magnificence
of mountains towards the capital. Opportunity
for Dublin Fusiliers. Characteristic climbing.
Crockery crash and its sequel. Mountain forest.
Changeableness of climate. Wayside scene
and some reflections. Is your master drunk?
Babies of the poor. Loess roads. Travelers,
and how they should travel. Wrangling about
payment at the tea-shop. The lying art among
the Chinese. Difference of the West and East.
Strange Chinese characteristic. Eastern
and Western civilization, and how it is working.
Remarks on the written character and Romanisation.
Will China lose her national characteristics?
“Ih dien mien, ih dien mien."A nasty
experience of the impotently dumb. Rescued in
the nick of time.

When the day shall come for its history to be told,
the historian will have little to say of Lu-feng-hsien,
that is—­if he is a decent sort of fellow.

He may refer to its wonderful bridge, to its beggars
and its ruins. The stone bridge, one of the best
of its kind in the whole empire, and I should think
better than any other in Yuen-nan, stands to-day conspicuously
emblematic of ill-departed prosperity. So far
as I remember, it was the only public ornament in
a condition of passable repair in any way creditable
to the ratepayers of the hsien. The wall is decayed,
the people are decayed, and in every nook and cranny
are painful evidences of preventable decay, marked
by a conservatism among the inhabitants and unpardonable
indolence.

The bridge, however, has stood the test of time, and
bids fair to last through eternity. Other travelers
have passed over it since the days of Marco Polo,
but I should like to say a word about it. Twelve
yards or so wide, and no less than 150 yards long,
it is built entirely of grey stone; with its massive
piers, its excellent masonry, its good (although crude)
carving, its old-time sculpturing of dreadful-looking